#A QUIET PLACE NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS MOVIE#

All of these scenes are paralysingly frightening, and one absolute standout scene in a flooded basement almost matches Annihilation’s mutant bear for brain-rattling terror. Krasinski proves himself to be an incredibly adept horror director, loading every monster encounter with unbearable tension and very real threat. Every step matters, any stumble could spell death, and an exposed nail on the stairs sits there with the power of a landmine. The bad is that Blunt’s character is heavily pregnant, and neither birth nor a baby are particularly conducive to silence. Civilisation looks no closer to being restored, but our heroes are holed up in relative safety in a sound-proofed farmhouse. After this supply trip goes catastrophically wrong, we flash-forward over a year. Led by real-life wife and husband Emily Blunt and John Krasinski as the mum and dad, this small unit are the only characters in the film, and the anxiety of their situation is written all over their faces. The draining terror of this existence is evident from the first scene, as an exhausted family scrounges for supplies from an abandoned store. These creatures, clawed and armoured giant reptilian beasts, have no senses other than hyper-advanced hearing, so what’s left of a decimated humanity is forced to stay silent at all times.

John Krasinski’s film is a relentless machine of a heart-stopping thriller with an inspired central conceit and some properly terrifying monsters.

#A QUIET PLACE NEWSPAPER CLIPPINGS MOVIE#

A Quiet Place understands this principle better than any horror movie since perhaps It Follows. Don’t get bogged down in anything unnecessary, just terrify your audience. It’s a lesson in great monster design, but purity is also the key to success for most horror films. In the greatest sci-fi horror of all time, Alien, the android’s excuse for valuing the xenomorph’s life so much more than his human crewmates’ is that he ‘admires its purity’.

A quiet place newspaper clippings